Note:
If you're trying to get the Japanese to work with your browser on a
Windows system,
you'll want to check here.

To encode English characters on a computer, ASCII is commonly used.
For Japanese characters, there are three common encodings. But ``common'' only
in a certain sense, for most browsers don't support any form of Japanese.

Support isn't that difficult, technically, but in this English-centric
software world.... sigh.

If your browsers does not support Japanese, this dictionary server can
still be useful. It will send Japanese text encoded as individual images...
a slow process, but effectively allowing any viewer that supports gif
images to ``support'' Japanese.

But it is slow, and if possible, you are encouraged to use
WWW browsers that support Japanese, if possible.

Encoding Types

Japanese Industrial Standard. The JIS group is more or less the
Japan version of ANSI (American National Standards Institute), with
a touch of UL (Underwriter's Laboratory, a private corporation)
thrown in. The term ``JIS'' is used in the computing community to refer
to their encoding standard. It is probably the best for communication
purposes, as it's a 7-bit code more or less using escape sequences and
ASCII characters to encode the Japanese.

Extended Unix Code. Pronounced ``Eee you see''. Actually, a subset
of a more widely-scoped (but under-implemented) method of encoding many
of the worlds various languages. This server works with EUC internally.
EUC is more or less JIS without the escape sequences, and the 8th bit
turned on in encoded bytes. Sometimes this can be written as EUC-JP.

Huh, I thought you said three? Well, Unicode is another standard
developed by
The Unicode Consortium which is gaining popularity. Most
of the world's written languages can be represented with Unicode.
On the web, Unicode is written using UTF-8, which this server can
display.